Blu-Ray Review: Secret Window

It is a widely known fact that pretty much every big screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel is total trash, with the exception of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  The TV mini-series seem to fare much better, usually because they aren’t trying to shoe horn five hundred pages of prose with many interweaving stories into ninety minutes of screen time.

For every IT (yes even the campy 80s version) there is a Needful Things (my personal favourite of King’s books, and a crime of a film, especially Max Von Sydow).
So back in 2004, screenwriter and Director David Koepp took the short(ish) story Secret Window, Secret Garden from the Five To Midnight book and adapted it to the screen with mixed results.

The Movie
The strange thing about Secret Window is it feels like a story that should have been adapted for TV, rather than a major motion picture that you would pay to go and see.
The biggest draw is, of course, Johnny Depp playing the main character of Mort Rainey, a performance which he pretty much phones in until later on in the movie when his true talents shine through.

The basic premise for those that don’t know is this: Mort Rainey (Captain Jack Sparrow) is a novelist who is near the end of a messy divorce after his wife (Maria Bello) left him for another man (Timothy Hutton), and he is now living in near isolation in a log cabin next to a lake (moved from King’s usual Maine to upstate New York) with only his dog, several cans of Mountain Dew and a dotty cleaning lady for company.
Then Rainey receives a visitor named John Shooter (John Turturro), claiming that he originally wrote the Secret Window story from Rainey’s published collection (manuscript in hand).

From here everything spirals out of control as they always do in these kind of films and you have ninety minutes of solid drama, coupled with the obligatory twist and an ending that I really wasn’t expecting (it gets better the second time you watch it).
Secret Window is without a doubt one of the better King adaptations, maintaining most of the original story and turning in solid, if uninspired performances from its key players.

Audio Visual
For what is a pretty ordinary looking movie, this Blu-ray disc is very capable visually.  The film has an intentional “washed out” look to it, and while it does struggle a little with some cheap looking CG effects, there are also a number of scenes outside the cabin in near pitch black which look a little below par.
You can look past these quibbles for the rest of the movie, outdoor scenes in the sunshine look particularly lush (one of the opening shots of the camera crossing the lake to Rainey’s cabin is particularly effective, as are the town scenes).  It looks like there is life in the old MPEG2 codec yet, and Secret Window is presented here in 1080p for your enjoyment.

Audio-wise, you get a bog standard DD 5.1 mix as well as an uncompressed PCM track.  Naturally the uncompressed audio is the way to go, and you have another fairly well balanced track here that doesn’t swamp the dialogue with ambient sound or the fairly minimalist (but sometimes booming) orchestral score.
I didn’t really notice anything to write home about with the audio, there is some good use of aural panning later on in the movie which helps to develop a wall of sound around you, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Special Features
You receive a t-shirt saying “I listened to the Secret Window commentary and stayed awake”  if you can wade through the drier than Boxing Day turkey commentary from Koepp.  I won’t be receiving the t-shirt, he was far too droney for my liking.
There are three featurettes of varying length (mainly twenty to thirty minutes) dealing with the transition from book to film, and the making of the movie.  They are mainly talking head style soundbites that were made to be shown on TV, but there is some interesting stuff here which make them a welcome addition to the disc.
You also get a few throwaway deleted scenes and some animatics.

Summing Up
Secret Window surprised me on Blu-ray.  I watched the movie on its original DVD release and enjoyed it in a semi-throwaway style, good but slightly disappointing.
With the visual (and slightly aural) enhancements on this HD disc the movie has gone up somewhat in my estimations (although not a great deal).  This is the first MPEG2 Blu-ray transfer I have seen that has really impressed me, and while it’s not going to win any awards, what you get for your money (and not a great deal of it either, as this is a more budget release, as with a number of older movies that are now available on the format) is a well encoded movie with a decent(ish) set of special features.
If you’re a fan of King and Depp then it’s worth checking out at the decent price of £13.99 from Play.com.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Category: Reviews